Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Josh Blackman writes a piece in which he gets most things wrong, but I suspect that has to do with his own pro-abortion biases as much as anything.
Still, he got this part right:
In the wake of Dobbs, we are already seeing the democratic process at work. And critically, legislatures in red states are forced to confront issues they simply never had to decide before. The absence of Roe is requiring elected representatives to cast difficult votes on abortion. The New York Times distills the process with the headline: “With Roe Gone, Republicans Quarrel Over How Far to Push Abortion Bans.” Read through the article. At every juncture, I see government in action.
The thing is, the blue states are also struggling with those same questions.
And as I’ve already pointed out the other day, support for abortion on demand right up to the moment of birth, even amongst the Democrat rank and file is not nearly as high as it is amongst the Democrat party establishment. Indeed, the Democrats position on abortion is anything but a slam dunk, unless you ignore the next election cycle.
Which in turn, is precisely why as the article points out Democrats insisted that the courts needed to step in. They knew they wouldn’t win the argument any other way. They still know it, which explains the Democrat party’s efforts to pack the court. In other words, and somewhat ironically, Democrats are engaged in a 60-year-long effort to bypass democracy, and the Dobbs ruling put a stop to it.
Blackman tries rather unsuccessfully to make a direct comparison between the issue of individual gun rights and abortion. He suggests that since the states were given the responsibility of dealing with the abortion question in Dobbs, they should have also been given that responsibility on the case of gun rights vis-a-vis Bruen. It is here that his argument goes completely off the Constitutional rails. I would have expected a better understanding of the Constitution from him even with his biases. But, I suppose not.
Glen Reynolds in noting the same article, does an excellent job of dissecting this portion of it:
The Constitution explicitly expresses a view on gun rights; it does no such thing regarding abortion. And that’s because there are important structural/political aspects to whether the populace is be armed, considerations that do not enter into issues regarding abortion. That the Supreme Court noticed such a thing should not be a huge surprise, nor is it evidence of any particular contradiction.
Indeed so.
If anything is surprising about this it’s that the Supreme Court for the first time in a generation is actually reading and interpreting the Constitution as written. In other words, they’re actually doing their job. That’s something that you will never see when the Democrat appointees are in majority.
Which, in turn, is precisely why you’re hearing a lot of screaming just now, coming from your left.
